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3 Oct 2013

Traversing Africa 2013 compared to 1870

When Henry Morton Stanley’s epic
expedition left Bagamoyo in Tanzania in March 1871, he was not travelling light. His quarry was David Livingstone – explorer
extraordinaire but missing and not heard from for years, somewhere deep in the Heart of Darkness. Charged with such a
mission, Stanley was prepared for anything.

His party number 192 people in
total, including over 100 porters, 22 soldiers, a cook, a tailor, an
interpreter, 27 donkeys, 2 horses and a dog.
His baggage allowance was generous too – 8.5tons of supplies and equipment
were borne along by this menagerie of animals and porters. Accounting for much of this weight was
Stanley’s equivalent of hard currency – a staggering 8,000 yards of fine cloth,
with which he hoped to barter and trade his way through the interior. No traveller’s cheques or ATMs here. Supplementing his 52 bales of cloth were
several porter loads of decorative beads and general haberdashery.

In this respect, life for us is much
more straight forward. Hard currency,
VISA and Mastercard take up far less room and seem equally effective.

In terms of personal protection,
Stanley was also not taking any chances.
Armed to the hilt, his entourage was packing double barrelled shotguns,
Winchester rifles, revolvers, pistols, 24 muskets, 24 hatchets, 24 long knives,
2 swords, 2 daggers, 1 boar spear, 1 battle axe – and, just in case, an
elephant gun. This arsenal, and an
apparent willingness to unleash it on Africa’s fauna from time to time, was
still not enough to keep Camp Stanley from starvation on more than one
occasion.

In this area too, we have less of a
challenge. More useful these days than
boar spears and battle-axes are mosquito repellent, anti-malarials and a
well-stocked fridge. Stanley himself
succumbed to both malaria and small-pox during his great traversa, and would
have envied the contents of our comprehensive first aid kit. Sleeping sickness was unknown to him and
Tsetse flies plagued his camp mercilessly – against which his regular doses of
quinine and rum with lemon juice proved not so effective.

Navigation and communication is of
course far easier in the 21st Century as well. While Stanley’s elegant dispatches took many
months to be carried back through the jungle to Bagamoyo, then onwards to
Zanzibar and finally by steam ship to New York, today we have the luxury of instant
communication. Cell phone coverage is
extensive, even in wildly improbable places, and when that fails we have a
satellite phone as back up. Wi-fi is
also prevalent in some of the smarter campsites (although often with
frustratingly slow speeds.) GPS provides
us with often ludicrously easy route planning.
Even where the road is no more than two sandy tyre ruts the chances are
that our Tracks4Africa software recognises our route. Gone are the days of wandering through
unknown territory for months on end, elephant gun and battle axe at the ready…

By the end of a hard days
bushwhacking, Stanley would have been lucky to cover 5 or 10 kilometres. With Tonka, even in thick sand and
corrugations, we are able to cover 200 kilomteres a day in relative comfort
(although relative is the operative word.)

And at the end of the day, setting
up camp in 2013 is much easier too. Even
in the most rustic of campsites we can have our tent out and fire going in less
than 15 minutes. Things for Stanley’s
entourage were not so simple – while Stanley’s private tent (complete with
bear-skin rug and chest of drawers) was set up, his men had the daily routine
of chopping thorn bushes to build a protective “boma” around the camp, then
gathering grasses to use as rudimentary sleeping mats.

So on balance, particularly given
Stanley’s regular skirmishes with the locals along his way, we have by far the
easier deal. As we ourselves head
towards Livingstone in a few weeks time, we are firmly convinced that what has
been lost in terms of Victorian romance is more than made up for by a Toyota
Landcruiser and wet wipes.